But there are others who take the relative strengths and weaknesses of the 30 NBA teams more seriously, because they have money riding on it. Many of those folks are offshore, spending today’s holiday on the beaches of the tiny islands where their computer servers are located.

Those folks run gambling Websites, and they have posted odds on each team’s chances to win the NBA title. We won’t play favorites here and reveal where these particular odds came from, but they provide a more objective perspective than the subjective ones that come from writers such as myself and my friend Marc Stein, whose power rankings have been a fixture on ESPN.com for a decade.